Richard Cohen has Torture Issues

In the Washington Post today Richard Cohen poses the question “What if Cheney’s Right?”  He starts out by assuring us that he considers Cheney to be the biggest liar this side of beyond but maybe, just maaybee, he’s right about this torture thing being effective.

Torture is a moral abomination, and President Obama is right to restate American opposition to it. But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether “enhanced interrogation techniques” actually work.

He then goes on to point out that even though Cheney lied through his teeth about the WMD in Iraq and pretty much everything else he’s said since, could be possibly be telling the truth just this one time?  After all, there’s some CIA memos that the former VP is just sure he saw once and he’s positive they said that torture works.  So could it be true?

That is is a soupçon of bull doo is pointed out by Ezra Klein who reminds Cohen that only two weeks ago he wrote the following:

Of course it works—sometimes or rarely, but if a proverbial bomb is ticking, that may just be the one time it works.

So why is he professing his soupçon of doubt now?

Who knows?  Is he really trying to suggest that he was on the fence about it before, but Dick Cheney makes such a compelling case for water boarding that now he’s on board too?  Do we even care?

I mean, there are many arguments about whether or not torture “works”.  If you Google “torture effectiveness” a variety of opinions come up.  Notably Dick Cheney saying that it is.  But what I found most convincing were opinions by members of the military and CIA that torture is not particularly effective, that information derived from torture is unreliable and that other interrogation methods are more to be relied on.  Sources like this, this and this among others.

But the real question here is “so what?”  So what if torture is really effective, somewhat effective, minimally effective or not effective at all?  So what?  Torture is against our law and our principles as a nation.  We are not a nation that condones torture.

So I just have to conclude that Richard Cohen and his ludicrous question about Cheney lie somewhere between a soupçon of stupid and a steaming pile of stupid.

UPDATE:  Thanks to Brendan in comments for catching my link error - it was Adam Serwer who reminded Cohen that he had expressed a different opinion about torture’s effectiveness just two weeks ago, not Ezra Klein.

Posted by marindenver on 05/12/09 at 12:04 PM • Permalink

For the record, that post you link to and attribute to Ezra Klein is actually by Adam Serwer.

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